Mitchell Kaplan Helped Bring South Florida Out Of The Cultural Darkness. Now This Quiet Bookseller Faces An Uncertain Future.

November 17, 1996|Story By Matt Schudel

In a voice gentle and sure, he delivers a brief, thoughtful introduction, then steps away. He knows you're not here tonight to listen to him.

You've come to hear the famous, polished paragraphs of Maya Angelou or Saul Bellow or John Updike. You've come to hear sorrow, outrage and experience distilled into wisdom and art.

You tilt your head at a slight angle, the better to take in the strong, fitted sound of their words, and then you glimpse him again, off to the side, listening the same as you. Even if you don't know who this man is or why he's here, you can tell he's more than a literary emcee. He's come here tonight to present his heroes to the world. Over the past 13 years, more than a thousand of the leading writers of our time have come to read and discuss their works at a nine-day festival of letters in mid-November called the Miami Book Fair International. By the time it closes next Sunday, more than 500,000 people will have attended this year's festival in downtown Miami, making it the largest literary event in the United States. For the bookish among us, it is something of a national treasure.

And it all came about because Mitchell Kaplan, that quiet man in the shadows, came back to his hometown and believed it could become a true center of culture and ideas.

Since 1982, he has been the owner of South Florida's leading independent bookstore, Books & Books in Coral Gables and Miami Beach, and the guiding force behind the Miami Book Fair. Books have become not just his career but his life's mission. Even as a child in Miami Beach, when he read poetry and enlisted in political campaigns, he understood how the power of words can inspire action and heal the heart.

"The things I value in life are expressed through books," he tells you. I admired writers, the literary world, book culture. Some kids might value a scientist or mathematician- but writers were the people I looked up to. Writers became heroes to me, to a certain extent."

Today, the writers are saying Kaplan has become a hero to them. In the years since Books & Books opened and the book fair became established, a literary culture as promising as any in the country has emerged in South Florida. Though he hasn't written a word himself, the center of that culture is Mitchell Kaplan.

"Mitchell almost single-handedly deserves credit for making Miami a book town," says novelist Les Standiford, the director of the creative writing program at Florida International University.

"When I came here in 1981, there was nothing but fast cars, fast boats and guys with shirts open down to their navels. I thought to myself, what in God's name have I gotten myself into? Now, I find myself in one of the most important and vibrant literary centers in the country. And I think Mitchell has had a huge hand in making that happen."

Kaplan is tall and lean, with wavy hair, a dark, trimmed beard and warm, brown eyes. People sometimes tell him how much he looks like Jesus- a comparison he doesn't much appreciate. Yet as visitors, telephone calls and business papers swirl around him, he remains polite, placid and unrushed. He does not wear a watch.

"He's absolutely one of the most revered and respected booksellers nationwide," says Len Vlahos, a spokesman for the American Book-sellers Association, a national trade group.

Bookstores have popped up throughout South Florida since Kaplan opened his doors nearly 15 years ago. But there may be an ominous cost to his success. In August, just two blocks away from the original Books & Books in Coral Gables, the national chain of Barnes & Noble opened a store eight times the size of Kaplan's.

Some people fear that Kaplan could be-come a victim of the literary market he helped create and that, if his store goes under, something irreplaceable will be forever lost.

"It's like a pilgrimage," novelist and professor Roberto G. Fernandez says of his periodic visits from Tallahassee.

This is not just a bookstore. It's a landmark."

The oldest of four children, Mitchell Kaplan was born 41 years ago into an educated, politically active Jewish family in Miami Beach. His father, Joseph Kaplan, is a prominent labor lawyer who once ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature. One of his clients- and a frequent dinner guest- was Cesar Chavez, the leader of a California farmworkers union.

"Mitchell had this thirst for reading," recalls his mother, Helen Kaplan. "We are a family of readers. My husband is a frustrated poet."

In those days the Doubleday Book Shop on Lincoln Road- now long gone- was almost a second home to the Kaplan children.

"We would take the kids to Doubleday's as a treat," says Helen Kaplan, "like some people go for ice cream. When Mitchell opened the store on the beach, it had a lot to do with Doubleday's."

As a teen-ager, he was attracted to the political causes of the '60s and wrote poetry. He attended the Democratic convention in Miami Beach in 1972 and worked for presidential candidate George McGovern.